Shedling
Abilities
- Heat-seeker: always moves toward the hottest thing within 60 feet: an oven, a lantern, a torch, a creature that has just cast a fire spell.
- Scorch: melee attack +4 to hit, 1d4 + 2 fire damage.
- Spit: when it drops to 0 hit points it pops like a coal from a grate. One creature of the GM's choice within 5 feet makes a DC 12 Dexterity save or takes 2 (1d4) fire damage.
- Immune to fire damage.
Weaknesses
- A bucket of water, or any splash of cold liquid, deals 5 cold damage and stops it flying until the end of its next turn.
- Will not attack a creature holding Orpiment's Scale.
When a dragon’s scale falls somewhere warm, it sometimes wakes. A shedling is a palm-sized flake of hot, pigment-yellow scale with six stubby legs underneath and a mouth along its leading edge, and it wants exactly one thing: to be warmer. It skitters, glides on the heat off a roof, and dives into the nearest fire as if it were coming home.
Habits
Alone, a shedling is a nuisance that sets thatch alight. In a swarm, following the heat of a town’s bread ovens on a summer noon, it is a fire with legs. They do not hunt people, but they will go straight through anyone standing between them and a hearth, and they pop like coals when they break.
Most shedlings cool and go still within a day, and are then only very hard scales that fetch a crown each from tinkers. The vale had never seen one until the Midsummer Fair, when Orpiment shook herself on the roof of the Wool Exchange and some two dozen fell into the square.
At the table
Brief original stats for fifth-edition play: AC 15 (its own scale), HP 7, speed 10 feet and fly 30 feet, Strength 4, Dexterity 14, Constitution 12. Immune to fire. Blindsight 30 feet, and it senses the direction of any strong heat within 60 feet.
On day 1 the Wardens met twelve of them in two waves of six at the bread ovens on the green, with the fair crowd still in the way. That is 600 XP, a Low fight for four level 3 characters by the numbers; the crowd, the burning awnings and the fire every kill spits make it play like a Moderate one.
Connections
Ties
- The Tally Cliffs located at
❦ Named by
- Orpiment created Shedling
- The Landlady's Landing caused Shedling